Here is an interesting problem. I need to append (into a new table) data in an ASCII text file which has many records which are broken into two segments, because they are longer than 256 characters, apparently the maximum length of a DOS text file line. The base text file has 9600 records of 38 fields each, of which about 600 are > 256 chrs in length, and thus are continued as a separated next record. This glitch does "very bad things" to a simple APPEND FROM . So, the question is, is there some direct way to do this without having to go the hard way and 1) test each text record for whether it's broken or not; 2) if broken, reconstruct it by adding the next record to it; 3) then, since this string cannot be APPENDed (or can it?), it will have to parsed, field-by-field as MEMVARs and INSERTed into the dbf file.